Quotes About Survival

There seemed nothing to do but live.

And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

Faith in the guidance of Spirit gives you the courage to take risks, because you're assured that whatever happens, a Higher Power is on your side and you will survive.

Shawnees moved so often and dispersed so widely that they sometimes seemed like a people without a homeland of their own.

Americans in 1763 lived always in the shadow and presence of death. Death was not yet romanticized as it would be in the 19th century, nor yet sanitized as it would be in the 20th century.

Há muito que os comissários do gulag se tinham aposentado, com medalhas e pensões. Nem um único comparecera perante a justiça. A Rússia voltara as costas ao passado. Como podia eu entender? Desde o Holocausto, o meu mundo fizera da memória um dever. A Rússia, tal como a China, optara pelo esquecimento. Era assim que as pessoas sobreviviam, dizia o escritor Shamalov. Uma nação não se construía sobre a verdade.

someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once. Only to live, to live and live. Life, whatever it may be...

it is only the species Homo sapiens that is played out. 'The stars in their courses have turned against him and he has to give place to some other animal better adapted to face the fate that closes in on mankind.' In the final pages of the pamphlet, his trump of the last judgement has changed into the question: Can civilization be saved?

Men start off good and then the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood--all the Nickel boys--existed in the capacity. Breathed in it, ate in it, dreamed in it. That was their lives now. Otherwise they would have perished. The beatings, the rapes, the unrelenting winnowing of themselves. They endured. But to love those who would have destroyed them? To make that leap? We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you.

There were plenty of things in the world that deserved to stay dead, yet they walked.

White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.

This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

To think of those Nickel nights where the only sounds were tears and insects, how you could sleep in a room crammed with sixty boys and still understand that you were the only person on earth. Everybody and nobody around at the same time. Here everybody was around and by some miracle you didn't want to wring their neck but give them a hug.

The only currency to satisfy the debt was their survival and to help others when circumstances permitted.

It was the day after Sam's house collapsed, though she couldn't be sure. Best to measure time now with one of the Randall plantation's cotton scales, her hunger and fear piling on one side while her hopes were removed from the other in increments. The only way to know how long you are lost in the darkness is to be saved from it.

It was not enough to survive, you have to live—

How to undo slavery's injury to the mental faculties–so many freed men continued to be enslaved by the horrors they'd endured.

Black people always found a way in the most miserable circumstances. If we didn't, we'd have been exterminated by the white man long ago.

Her price fluctuated. When you are sold that many times, the world is teaching you to pay attention. She learned to quickly adjust to the new plantations, sorting the nigger breakers from the merely cruel, the layabouts from the hardworking, the informers from the secret-keepers.

The world is mean from the start and gets meaner every day. It uses you up until you only dream of death. Mabel

What a world it is, Cora thought, that makes a living prison into your only haven. Was she out of bondage or in its web: how to describe the status of a runaway?

Problem was, even if you avoided trouble, trouble might reach out and snatch you anyway. Another student might sniff out a weakness and start something, one of the staff dislikes your smile and knocks it off your face. You might stumble into a bramble of bad luck of the sort that got you here in the first place.

Nowdays, Rosie the Rivetere was a former soccer mom who had just opened her own catering business when Last Night came down and her husband and kids were eaten by a parking attendant at the local megamall's discount- appliance emporium.